DotBlu snags $2M for gaming social network
Online gaming community DotBlu has raised $2 million in first-round funding from D.E. Shaw and Maple Investments. The San Francisco-based site lets users play aracade and betting games, earn and spend “BluBucks” on virtual cars, houses and gifts, and create and take quizzes. Players create profiles and avatars that they can then trick out also using BluBucks.
The year-old startup initially launched as a betting site called BluBet. It received $225,000 in seed funding from investors… Continue Reading
Roundup: TV news still main source for some, HP has strong quarter, free subway tickets? and more
Here’s the latest action:
Study: Educated older people still get most of their news from television — The “educated” demographic, 23 percent of the U.S. population, also gets news online, according to a buzzword-laden report by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. This demographic is called “Integrators,” according to the language of Pew, and is somewhat similar in behavior to the younger, smaller group of online-focused readers it calls “Net-Newsers.”
Hewlett-Packard had a strong… Continue Reading
YouTube spoils made official, co-founders did well
YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are each worth about $326 million as a result of Google’s purchase of the video-sharing company, documents registered by Google Wednesday reveal.
Their takes are five times that of third co-founder Jawed Karim, who returned to Stanford before YouTube was bought last year. Karim got 137,443 shares, worth about $65 million based on the $470 closing price of Google’s stock yesterday. Hurley and Chen both have 694,087 shares.
For… Continue Reading
YouTube’s dancing Jawed, iLike’s music service, Veeker’s mobile splash
End-of-week roundup in Silicon Valley:
The YouTube jig, and lecture — Here’s a link to a lecture that Jawed Karim, the co-founder of video-sharing site YouTube gave this week. It is a history how YouTube got to where it did. GigaOm has a good summary.
The site’s founders suffered at first; they couldn’t get pretty girls to post videos, despite offering payment. But the site’s three co-founders hit the winning recipe in June 2005, Karim explains, when they… Continue Reading
YouTube follow: Yahoo gets bashed, “page view” metrics & the third man
Now that Google has snapped up hot video site YouTube, everyone is piling on Yahoo, which is supposed to be Google’s competitor.
They’re criticizing Yahoo for being too slow. The NYT cites an advertiser saying clients are taking out fewer ads on Yahoo, preferring hipper sites like MySpace. There’s the WSJ, saying Yahoo’s negotiations to buy college social networking company Facebook (as previously reported) aren’t going anywhere, and that it has fewer reserves than Google to… Continue Reading